I remember the Halloweens of my childhood. My mom would dress me up in some horribly uncomfortable plastic mask — maybe Mickey Mouse, maybe Donald Duck one year, I think — and fret about the eyeholes: Were they too narrow? Could I see? She should have been more worried about the breathing holes, which were always too narrow and filled the nose of my mask with such stale air that halfway through trick-or-treating I would flip my mask up on top of my head.

So my brother and I would venture out, but after she dressed us up, she would sit my brother, Michael, and me down to lecture us about safety, staying out of the streets, avoid certain houses, the usual. Then she would send us out — usually after dark — alone. Bear in mind, though, that this was the mid-1970s and real, honest-to-goodness evil — excepting President Nixon, of course — was still pretty far away from the newly-poured sidewalks of my subdivision in Little Rock, Arkansas. Cocaine, herpes, disco and other modern bogeymen were safely contained in New York, Los Angeles and other modern-day Gomorrahs. Still, you can never really trust your neighbors, so she made us promise she could inspect any candy we received before eating ourselves sick on it. I guess she figured the harm our neighbors might wish us was scarier than any mischief that ghosts and goblins might get up to.

Then, to really scare the hell out of us, she would read us a story: “The Goblins’ll Getchya if you Don’t Watch Out!” It was one of those delightfully creepy Southern witching tales — sort of a Southern Gothic Lite — that seems totally at home in the back bayous of the Mississippi River or the entire state of Louisiana, where my father came from. “Goblins” was your standard-issue morality tale, the “kid doesn’t listen to his parents’ dire warnings and lets his little brother get snatched by goblins on Halloween night.” To be honest, the sad fate that befell the little brother‹becoming a goblin child and dancing and gnawing on bones in the graveyard, gnashing my teeth and living underground for the rest of the year‹didn1t sound that bad. A little grimy, perhaps, but I figured I could adapt, should I get got by goblins. Plus, Michael would get in a lot of trouble for letting the goblins spirit me off, so it seemed a no-lose situation for me.

Especially since the real-life goblins in our household were genuinely scary. My father’s idea of a good time was to dress like a hobo and swill beer until he was pissfaced drunk. He would stumble around the house like a grumpy and recently awakened troll. The only difference was that on Halloween, he took his act on the road. In addition to the scary, drunken hobo act, my dad thought it great fun to stuff a white sheet with newspapers, gather the sheet into a ball and string it up on a cord on our front porch. Woe to the trick-or-treaters foolhardy enough to approach our house, because as soon as the kids or their parents crept up, he would give a yank on the string, lifting the “ghost” into the air and howl like a trapped animal. Then he would give a drunken belch and laugh his head off.

This, of course, embarrassed Michael and me to no end. We were grateful to get out of the house if only for a night, the threat of goblins gettin’ us, notwithstanding. Mind you, we were 10 and 5 years old at the time and my dad’s behavior was quickly getting us ostracized by the rest of the neighborhood. But when we were out on Halloween — whether as a clown, a ghost or a Wookee — the other kids weren1t mean to us anymore. They didn’t taunt us: “Ha! Your dad’s a drunk!” Either they didn’t know who we were — a tribute to my mom’s costume-making skills — or they didn’t care, too caught up in their own fantasies of being something other than a neighborhood kid with the standard-issue amount of cruelty to dole out.

For one night, then, we were on an equal footing with the other kids, and — just like it was when the Celts celebrated Samhain in pre-Christian Ireland — the social order was overturned: boys dressed as girls and the girls dressed as boys. Petty vandalism was tolerated, and in my time, no one blamed those good-for-nothing Allbritton boys. There was plenty of blame to go around. (To be fair, though, sometimes the blame was well founded, as my brother was a tough in the making, even at his tender age.)

The evening’s masks and disguises leveled our pecking order, and without daylight on our faces, the kids seemed to band together to scare the adults. We were all troublemakers that night. We were all little goblins, and we were going to get ya if you didn’t watch out.

Now that I’m ostensibly an adult, I still play dress-up at Halloween. I can join the other kids on the block — all 30 or so like me — and just enjoy the temporary suspension of everyday life. And like another old tradition of Samhain, time doesn1t exist on this night; it’s the Day Between the Years as it was known in pagan tradition. Summer lumbers off the stage and the graceful and resplendent fall comes on. Past, present and future are entwined and our histories are no different from our possibilities, which is to say they’re exactly what we want them to be. I can be a devil or a saint — or even both, really.

So bring on the goblins. I’ll bet they get tired of gnawing and gnashing and dancing in the crypts. Let us all trade places, and let our ghosts walk with us instead of haunting us. There’s a whole year for that.